


three women

by reapingfolk



Category: Korean Drama, 드림하이 | Dream High
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:25:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reapingfolk/pseuds/reapingfolk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She's not going to live up to your memory of her." Sam-Dong learns silence and absence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	three women

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peroxidepest17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peroxidepest17/gifts).



             _She’s not going to live up to your memory of her_.

            That’s what Seo-Yeon said before she left. Standing in front of his green room after the first concert of his international tour, with only a door between him and his first love, Sam-Dong thinks about her words and wonders if she’s right. Not for the first time in seven years, he hesitates.

            Hye-Mi, his constant companion through the years, appears on his left in a brown school uniform. _Fool_ , she says with a familiar curve to her lips, _what are you afraid of? Me?_

            Hye-Mi appears on his right in a coat made from bags. _Ma-Ri_ _was right_ , she says. _Whoever’s on the other side of that door can’t compare with me._

Hye-Mi appears in front of him, wedged in the small space between him and the door, a perfect vision with shining bright eyes. _Why don’t you open the door and find out, Sam-Dong ah?_

            Sam-Dong closes his eyes.

            _Maybe maybe maybe_.

            He opens the door.

—

            Granite and gray. That’s what New York was. His phone buzzed constantly the first month he was there. Messages of encouragement arrived daily from his friends, interrupting the busy training schedule put into place by the entertainment agency. From Pil-Sook during a dance practice: _make sure to eat lots of good food!_ From Jin-Gook during a vocal lesson: _show them what we’re about!_ From Jason during a meeting with a personal trainer: _let me know if you need help with your English lessons_. From Baek-Hee during a private tutoring session: _she’s doing okay_.

            He was grateful to Baek-Hee, whom he barely spoke to while at Kirin High, for understanding what he needed most to hear without him asking. He didn’t ask Baek-Hee about Hye-Mi’s silence and he didn’t explain to her the sharp sting of disappointment he felt every time his phone dinged and a name other than Hye-Mi’s appeared on the screen. He didn’t ask, nor did he explain, to Baek-Hee because, of them all, he knew she understood his strange, uncompromising love.

            After a dance practice three months into his exile, his fellow dancers asked him out for drinks and he agreed. They took him to an upstairs bar in K-Town and convinced the server through a lethal combination of boyish grins and large, pleading eyes, that Sam-Dong was a visiting graduate student who left his identification card at the hotel. The walls were covered with folded chopstick wrappers. When he leaned in close, Sam-Dong could read the private messages written on them. _Hwon + Yeon Woo forever! Ji Wan, where are you — Kang Jin_. The server kept bringing out bowl after bowl of watermelon soju and the silent conversation at the table blurred with those on the wall.

            Tony, his roommate, tapped him on the shoulder and gestured at the wall with a pen in his hand. Sam-Dong remembered to modulate the volume of his voice when he answered.

            “No, I don’t have a message for anyone.”

            He didn’t think he drank that much, but he must’ve because Tony had to guide him to his own bedroom. When he was finally alone, Sam-Dong sat on the floor with his back to the door and stared at the time on his phone screen. The morning would be rolling into the afternoon right now. _No new messages_. Without thinking about it, Sam-Dong sent a message across the world. _Are you free? Can I talk to you online?_

Baek-Hee’s face was concerned when she saw him.

            _Sam-Dong_? her lips curved.

            “I thought you would understand,” was all he could think to say in response. And she did. Baek-Hee’s face softened in such sympathy, Sam-Dong briefly considered closing his laptop screen and pretending none of this happened.

            _Do you know when I knew I loved her?_ she asked and it was like Sam-Dong was speaking to himself.

            “No,” he answered even though he knew. Knew without her telling him. Knew Baek-Hee’s story because it was his own.

            _It was when I first heard her sing_ , Baek-Hee told him and Sam-Dong thought, _yes_.

            Baek-Hee told him story after story and he felt like the unbearable weight in his chest eased up with each one. He fell asleep with the program running. When he woke, Baek Hee had signed off, but there was a new message on his phone.

            _Devotion is nothing to be ashamed of, Sam-Dong_.

—

            Suzy had long, black hair like a curtain of silk. When she spoke, her thin fingers moved with the precision that came from years of practice. The agency hired her to teach him American sign language and English. She was born and raised in New York, in her second year at Columbia, but when she spoke Korean, her lips moved like a Seoul girl’s. During their first lesson, she walked into the coffee shop and made Sam-Dong blush by saying, _No one told me my student would be so tall and handsome_. _No wonder they want to train you. You look like an idol already_. After each formal lesson, they would have conversations that were a combination of sign and spoken English. Suzy told him she was envious of his ability to replicate sounds so flawlessly.

            _I have a knack of languages, but you,_ _you’re something special, Sam-Dong_.

            Suzy took him out to eat noodles in fragrant Flushing restaurants, to judge art in brightly lit Greenwich galleries, and to dance in crowded Williamsburg concerts. She laughed easily and spoke quickly, her lips and fingers rarely still.

            When the Spring came and coaxed the flowers into unfurling in Central Park a year later, Suzy leaned over their picnic blanket and kissed him with a smile on her lips. Sam-Dong felt the breeze curling his long hair and thought about snow. The park was silent.

            _Sam-Dong_? Suzy asked when she pulled back.

            “There’s a girl,” he replied. “My girl.”

            _Baek-Hee? The one you talk to all the time?_

            “No,” he said. “I haven’t spoken to her since I arrived.”

            _Then how can you know she’s still yours?_

How could he explain to Suzy, who was beautiful and intelligent, who turned heads everywhere she went and could not imagine such a rejection after a year of affection.

            “Do you like music?” he asked, in an effort to explain.

            _Yes. What does that have to do with this?_

“Do you only like music when you hear it? You’re not listening to any music now. If I asked you to give up music now, while you don’t hear it and remember how much you like it, would you give it up?”

            _No, of course not._

            “That’s why she’s still mine.”

            Suzy stopped coming to their language lessons, citing a heavy workload at the university. When the agency gave him the news, he could only think of a girl on the other side of the world, a girl with a sullen face and disdainful eyes, a girl like a salvation song made silent by the distance.

— 

            In the third year of his exile, the agency considered him ready to debut as an opening act for an American band. They moved him to California and auditioned hundreds of dancers to back him up on tour. That was how he met Ma-Ri. Ma-Ri had short, dyed blond hair, a lip ring, and spoke no Korean. When they met in the dance studio, she shook his hand firmly and introduced herself as Mary Lee, but in his mind, he considered her Lee Ma-Ri. Ma-Ri grew up in San Francisco to second-generation parents who spoke only English to her. When one of the other Korean dancers tried to flirt with her by asking her to call him _oppa_ , she kicked him in the knees, knocking him to the floor, before asking, “ _Oppa_ , are you okay?”

            Ma-Ri had a big, deep laugh, unapologetic and all teeth. There was a strength to the way she lived her life that Sam-Dong found achingly familiar.

            _I hear you’re pining after some girl in Korea_ , she said from her seat in front of him a few months after they met. They were eating lunch together onstage, as they often did, while the other dancers practiced. She was trying to be casual, but he could see the way she gripped her chopsticks.

            “Not pining. Just — waiting.”

            _For what?_

A sign. A sound. A song.

            “For her to tell me to move on.”

            Ma-Ri reached over and touched the necklace he always wore.

            _Maybe she’s already forgotten about you._          

—

            He fought with Ma-Ri when the tour ended, before they went their separate ways. Before the celebratory party, he searched for his necklace and couldn’t find it. Sam-Dong tore his hotel room to shreds trying to find it. His roommate called Ma-Ri for assistance and when she saw the disaster area that was his temporary living quarters, she confessed.

            _I took it and sent it back to her! I’m not sorry. You have to move on, Sam-Dong. She’s forgotten about you._ Sam-Dong didn’t remember the rest of the night.

            Two weeks later, Ma-Ri was gone and there was a package in his mailbox. The necklace fell out with a note.

            _Return it in person_. _I’ll be waiting._

—

            He met Seo-Yeon Choi-Rosenberg during an interview. In the fifth year of his exile, a leaked single from his debut album went viral on the internet. Seo-Yeon was polished and professional, fresh out of journalism school and interviewing him for an online music magazine. After the interview was over, she asked him out to dinner and he agreed. Dinner turned into a movie the following week, which transitioned to Seo-Yeon spending time at the recording studio whenever she had free time. When Seo-Yeon kissed him, he kissed her back and tried not to think of impossible loves, of cruel girls who never called or replied to messages, whose voice was the only one he could remember besides his own.           

            When he picked Seo-Yeon up for his album release party, she waved him into the apartment and handed him a wrapped box. Inside was a CD.

            _That’s Go Hye-Mi_ , Seo-Yeon said, her eyes never leaving his face. _Have you heard of her? She’s really big in Korea right now. Young, but what a voice._

“Seo-Yeon.”

            _You went to the same high school, didn’t you? Did you ever talk to her while you were there?_

When his album shot to the top of every chart, the accolades from friends and critics came pouring in. He refused to read any of it, just like he refused to put Hye-Mi’s disc into his CD player. He didn’t want to hear silence from her.

            The night the Grammy nominations came out, he went back to that upstairs bar in New York City’s K-Town and placed a note on the wall of chopstick wrappers.

            _Maybe. Maybe. Maybe._

            He sent Baek-Hee a message: _maybe devotion is something to be ashamed of, Baek-Hee._

            In response, Baek-Hee sent him a series of video links. They were all of Hye-Mi’s concerts and his heart was such a traitor, even after all those years, because the sight of her sent it flying, soaring, bursting through the air. He was do distracted by the sight of Hye-Mi that he almost missed what Baek-Hee wanted him to see, to hear. What Hye-Mi said before beginning each concert.

            _And I would like to send this out to an old friend, walking his own lonely road._

            He broke up with Seo-Yeon the next morning.    

—

            There are three women standing between him and Hye-Mi. Those three women are, in order:

            Hye-Mi.

            Hye-Mi.

            Hye-Mi.

            Hye-Mi in a white dress onstage, Hye-Mi with an air horn in her hands, Hye-Mi singing in Japan, Hye-Mi signing to him from the balcony. Hye-Mi, music in the shape of a girl.

            Sam-Dong opens the door and reminds himself that seven years is a long time, that he should take things slowly and relearn the contours of their relationship. His traitor heart never learned to heed warnings and so, when it sees her standing with a congratulatory bouquet in her hand, it sends him striding across the green room. There are countless women between him and Hye-Mi, endless iterations of the same first love, but they all disappear when he kisses her, desperate and grateful.

            When Hye-Mi pulls back, a large smile on her usually stoic face, Sam-Dong feels the silence break. When she speaks, he hears her voice clearly in his mind.

            “I think you have something of mine, Sam-Dong ah.”

            Yes, yes, yes, and he was keeping it forever.

 

          

**Author's Note:**

> if ya'll are about that tumblr life, i'm [noepithets](http://noepithets.tumblr.com).


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